The Results of the Duma Session

“We Did This Together”

Published:Zvezda, No. 28, May 28, 1911.

      Published according to theZvezdatext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1974],

      Moscow,Volume 17,

      pages206-210.Translated:Dora CoxTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Duringthe “historic” sitting of the Duma on April 27
Mr. Teslenko, who took issue with Mr. Stolypin, said in part:

“TheChairman of the Council of Ministers said to the
   State Duma:

   Yes, gentlemen, I shall come to your assistance in the very near
   future. There is the Bill about the Old Believers—you’ll probably arrange
   matters so as to vote it down before the recess, and then it will be put
   into effect during the recess. I even imagined in this a sort of flippant
   we-know-each-other-well tone, as if we were told: why, we did this
   together. And, gentlemen, forgive me if it reminds me of the scene in theInspector-General, in which the Mayor of the town says: ‘Ah! So
   you’ve come to lodge a complaint against me? Have you forgotten how we did
   this and that together?’ And, I presume, gentlemen, that those among you
   who, perhaps, once counted on this assistance, or who, perhaps, still count
   on it, must have felt embarrassed and, perhaps, thought (and you did well
   if you did think so): ‘God preserve us from such friends, we can cope with
   our enemies ourselves’.”

“TheChairman of the Council of Ministers said to the
   State Duma:

   Yes, gentlemen, I shall come to your assistance in the very near
   future. There is the Bill about the Old Believers—you’ll probably arrange
   matters so as to vote it down before the recess, and then it will be put
   into effect during the recess. I even imagined in this a sort of flippant
   we-know-each-other-well tone, as if we were told: why, we did this
   together. And, gentlemen, forgive me if it reminds me of the scene in theInspector-General, in which the Mayor of the town says: ‘Ah! So
   you’ve come to lodge a complaint against me? Have you forgotten how we did
   this and that together?’ And, I presume, gentlemen, that those among you
   who, perhaps, once counted on this assistance, or who, perhaps, still count
   on it, must have felt embarrassed and, perhaps, thought (and you did well
   if you did think so): ‘God preserve us from such friends, we can cope with
   our enemies ourselves’.”

Bythese words, Mr. Teslenko, according to the Verbatim Report, earned
“applause from the Left”, apparently from the benches of the people’s
freedom group. The Cadets regarded it as fitting irony directed against the
Octobrists. But in this case, as in many others, they applauded without
giving thought to the profound meaning of the words which their speaker let
fall. They applauded believing that these words wounded only the
Octobrists, that they compromised only their particularly hated
rivals. They did not realise that Mr. Teslenko’s apt phrase, if its meaning
is seriously analysed, represents a truth which stigmatises both the
Octobrists and the Cadets. It is worth dwelling on this truth at greater
length for it concerns one of the most vital questions of the past five or
six years—and what years!—of Russia’s political history.

“Wedid this together”—well put, Mr. Teslenko. But it would,
perhaps, be more correct to put it this way: you have excellentlyrepeatedwhat has been said time and again at “Left”
“meetings” which are usually so disparaged by the Cadet gentlemen. “We
did this together”—these words by no means apply only to bills in the
Third Duma, they by no means apply only to the notorious so-called
“miscellany”. They apply toeverythingthat the Stolypins and
the Russian liberal bourgeoisie (or the bourgeoisie that has pretended to
be liberal) “have done together” ever since the end of 1905. As for
Mr. Stolypin’s “flippant tone”, it was not something that the Cadet
speaker merely “imagined”, it was precisely the tone Stolypin assumes in
all his speeches, it is the tone of the whole policy of the Stolypins in
dealing with the bourgeoisie (who, in the persons of the Octobrist and
Cadet deputies, incidentally, constitute the majority in the Third Duma).

Thisflippant tone—which at every serious turn of events gives way to
gross bullying or even to brute force—is account ed for by the fact that
not only the Octobrists but the Cadets as well merely play for effect,
exclusively for the sake of winning applause (and the Stolypins know this
only too well) when they hurl phrases like: “God preserve us from such
friends [i.e., from the Stolypins], we can cope with our enemies [meaning,
apparently, the reactionaries on the Right, and—how can we express it in
the mildest possible terms?—the “exacting” Left] ourselves”.

Hadthese been more than mere words, Russia would by now have been
entirely and irrevocably rid of “such friends”. But the point is that the
Cadets hurl such phrases only in the heat of “opposition”
speeches—opposition speeches can not be made from the national rostrum
unless they are given democratic flavour, even if only a slight one. That
is why the Cadets sometimes give vent to democratic statements, which may
be usefully compared with thedeedsof these same Cadets. The
historical role of a bourgeoisie playing at democracy (or threatening the
enemy on the right with democracy) is such that this “playing” with words
sometimes serves a useful purpose for some sections of the popular masses
since it awakens sincere and profound democratic thought. “When the fiddle
is played upstairs, people downstairs want todance.” Thereisa Latin proverb that says:Littera scripta
manet—“what is written is permanent”. Nor do spoken words always
disappear, even if they are mere words and only spoken for effect.

Itdoes not follow, of course, that hypocritical phrases uttered by the
Cadets may be accepted at their face value, and that they may be proclaimed
or regarded as an expression of democracy. But it certainly does follow
that we ought to make use of every hypocritical phrase uttered by a Cadet
so long as it has a democratic ring; that we ought to make use of it,
first, to demonstrate the divergence between the words and the deeds of the
man uttering them, and, secondly, to show what real, vital and direct
significance democracy has for those masses who happen to get an inkling of
the flamboyant phrases uttered by the speakers in the Taurida Palace.

Thereflections of Mr. Teslenko quoted above are hypocritical, but not
because Mr. Teslenko personally was hypocritical in his remarks; he may
have been carried away by the torrent of his own oppositionist
eloquence. The statement is hypocritical because thewordsof the
representative of the Cadet Party are at variance with thedeedsof that party at all serious moments in modern Russian history.

Recallthe events of August 1905. What did Mr. Stolypin’s predecessor
do at that time? He was setting the stage for the Bulygin

Duma[1]and for elections to it. What did Mr. Teslenko and his friends
do at that time? Within the limits of their forces and in line with their
“speciality” in the sphere of public activity, they were setting the
stage for those same elections. Mr. Bulygin (and Mr. Stolypin) would be
justified in saying to Mr. Teslenko: “We did this together”. And
Mr. Teslenko “did this together” for the very reason that he was fearful
of being left without those “friends” of his, of whom he now says so
magnificently, with the courage of a knight errant: “God preserve us from
such friends.”...

Recallthe events that took place three months after the promulgation
of Bulygin’s State Duma Act. What did Mr. Stolypin’s predecessor do at that
time? He resisted, for instance, the movement of the postal and telegraph
employees and the numerous ramifications of similar
movements. Mr. Teslenko,or, at any rate, his party as personified by Mr. Struve, Mr. Karaulov, and
others, resisted—in its own way—the same movement. Mr. Witte (and
Mr. Stolypin) would be justified in saying to the Teslenkos: “We did this
together”. It was the same in the case of the working-class holiday on
May 1, 1906, in the case of the “local land committees” a little later,
and in 1907, systematically and invariably, in the attitude to the worker
and peasant deputies to the Second Duma, and so on, and so forth.

Thispolicy, which the Cadet Party has been pursuing for many years,
was summed up correctly by the well-known Cadet writer Mr. Izgoyev when he
declared inVekhi:

“Wemust at last have the courage to admit that the Vast majority of
members of our State Dumas, with the exception of thirty or forty Cadets
and Octobrists, have not shown themselves to possess the knowledge required
to under take the job of governing and reconstructing Russia.”

Mr.Izgoyev’s“courageous admission” is courageous because,
abandoning all appearances and all diplomacy, he has blurted out some words
oftruth. It is true that in “our State Dumas” the Cadets have
indeed been guided by the landowner, bourgeois, liberal-monarchist
“knowledge”, which could not satisfy “the vast majority of members”,
particularly those on the left. And it goes without saying, of course, that
Stolypin fought these latter members, and in fighting them relied for
support on the “knowledge” (or, more correctly: on the interests and
point of view) of “thirty or forty Cadets and Octobrists”. Mr. Stolypin
would be justified in saying to the entire Cadet Party: “We did this
together”—together we fought against the clumsiness, inexperience, and
ignorance of the workers and peasants.

Theprincipal result of this year’s session of the Duma is that the
excessively “flippant tone” assumed by Stolypin towards the majority of
the Third Duma—and, moreover, towards its bourgeois, Octobrist-Cadet,
majority—proved too much even for this majority, which cannot be
suspected of lacking in patience. The old regime assumes a flippant
attitude towards the bourgeoisie, even though the latter is well aware of
its own importance under the new, present day economic conditions, and is
longing for independence, even for power. The Article 87 episode brought
out thisflippant attitude so sharply and, at the same time, affronted some of the mighty
of this world so crudely, that even the most patient of people began to
grumble. But grumbling is as far as they can go. They are bound hand and foot,
and that is why they cannot go any farther. They are bound because at every
important juncture of Russian history, in the course of all these last years,
they have been afraid of the broad popular movement and turned their backs upon
it; they have been hostile to the forces of democracy—to the real, live,
active, mass forces of democracy—and have shunned them, attacked them from
the rear in the same way as Stolypin has attacked them. And with these facts
behind them, the Octobrists and the Cadets now suffer the penalty they deserve;
in point of fact, they havenothingwith which to parry Stolypin when
he assumes a flippant tone and tells them: “If I am an enemy of democracy,
you, my dear sirs, have proved that you are afraid of democracy—’we did
this together’”.

[1]TheBulygin Duma—the “advisory representative assembly”
which the tsarist government promised to convene in 1905. The Act for its
convocation and the regulations governing the elections were drafted by a
commission presided over by Minister of the Interior Bulygin, and,
published on August 6 (19), 1905. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an active
boycott of the Bulygin Duma, and its convocation was prevented by the
forces of the revolution.